Tuesday, July 09, 2013

"Identity at the Crossroads"

This workshop will explore crucial issues concerning interoperable identity management technologies for the information society.
Identity management has seen a series of development in the recent
years. Whereas identity management and federation standards have been
solidified and adopted in practice, nations world-wide are investing in
electronic identity systems as strong root identities for their citizens
offering a promise for strong authentication. Privacy-enhancing
identity systems have reached some technical maturity and may offer user
authentication with minimal disclosure. At the same time, personal
identifiable information and the user's identity has become a commodity
to drive the business of global corporations. Whereas such companies
sought to bind the users accounts to their unique identity, there has
been a reported unrest and anxiety of users because of their diminishing
privacy protection.
We see identity at the crossroads. One possibility is the unique
identification and strong authentication road that may offer increased
trust for e-commerce and increasing cloud services. Another is the road
of attribute exchange and leveraging the user's personal identifiable
information that may benefit business and help users to have a
consistent experience among many mobile compute platforms. Finally,
there is the privacy-enhancing identity systems road that may offer
additional protection for the user's civil rights. Partially these
different roads seem to contradict each other. Research can offer roads
less taken that overcome these seeming contradictions and come up with
next generation identity solutions.